Re: Death Knights will tank as Blood in Cataclysm

Awesome change! It's about time that talent trees aren't watered down for whatever role you're doing. It also makes sense to mark blood as the tank tree, because a lot of people already consider it "the" end-game tanking spec. It also makes sense with the removal of ArP on gear.

Please people. Keep in mind that this isn't the only thing changing with DKs. You may love to DPS as blood now (I'm not sure why...it's so mind bogglingly easy - play frost if you want fun), but a lot of the DPS mechanics of blood (DRW being the only interesting thing) will probably make an appearance of some sort in Frost and Unholy.

With frost being 100% DPS now, it will certainly get a better cooldown than UA. With unholy being 100% DPS now, it might get an improved ghoul, or even a better pet all together.

Just look at it this way. Instead of playing blood as DPS now, you'll be playing Frost or Unholy as DPS...but you'll have more tools to do your job effectively. In the same way, instead of tanking as Frost or Unholy now, you'll be tanking as blood...but you'll actually have tank talents - not just the universal 1st tier 5 point talents that every tank has already, and 1 or 2 "special" buttons based on your spec.

Re: Death Knights will tank as Blood in Cataclysm

I think there is a very simple reason (frankly I am not going to review all 33 pages of comments to see if this has been mentioned before)

THE MASTERY SYSTEM. The passive bonus that you receive by speccing deep within a tree. While we don't have the details on the system. How screwed would the DK's feel if the passive bonus on two of the trees was a tanking bonus and only one affected dps?

I think that looking at the individual talents is pointless until we know more. The best we can discern currently is that:

Blood = Protection Tree May or may not have dual wield tanking abilities. I bet we see a completely new tanking based Runic Power dump. I also think we will see an aggro heavy talent that links in to a base level talent
Frost = DPS tree, probably has the dual wield dps abilities, and will have most of the proc based read and react (Killing Machine Rime Procs). Frost has been moving towards dual wield for a long time. If they eliminate the tanking talents they can focus on rogue in plate model.
Unholy = DPS tree, probably the two-handed tree. They will likely force the player to manage the diseases more closely to create a varied rotation. May play more like a warlock in plate.

I do agree that we may be seeing a complete change in the presences however. Unholy is situational at best, Blood may become the new frost, and frost the old blood, with unholy providing multipliers on disease damage, like the ability for disease damage to crit, something along that order.

So once we factor in passive bonus, it appears to me that that the Mastery system is the driving force behind the change.

Re: Death Knights will tank as Blood in Cataclysm

Blizzard did the right thing by picking Blood to be the new tank spec. They're going to remove most of the boring passive +dmg talents from Blood anyhow. That would leave them with a ton of holes to fill in that talent tree.

Now that it's the tanking tree, they can patch the holes with tanking abilities from other trees or brand new ones.

To people who are so attached to Blood as dps, Unholy isn't really that different. You smash face with a 2h weapon, but you have a pet next to you. To think it's a radically different type of game style, is silly.

Regardless, the play styles for each tree are most likely going to be altered in a much more dramatic way, so you should really be prepared for THAT change.

Originally Posted by Woeful

I think there is a very simple reason (frankly I am not going to review all 33 pages of comments to see if this has been mentioned before)

THE MASTERY SYSTEM. The passive bonus that you receive by speccing deep within a tree. While we don't have the details on the system. How screwed would the DK's feel if the passive bonus on two of the trees was a tanking bonus and only one affected dps?

I think that looking at the individual talents is pointless until we know more. The best we can discern currently is that:

Blood = Protection Tree May or may not have dual wield tanking abilities. I bet we see a completely new tanking based Runic Power dump. I also think we will see an aggro heavy talent that links in to a base level talent
Frost = DPS tree, probably has the dual wield dps abilities, and will have most of the proc based read and react (Killing Machine Rime Procs). Frost has been moving towards dual wield for a long time. If they eliminate the tanking talents they can focus on rogue in plate model.
Unholy = DPS tree, probably the two-handed tree. They will likely force the player to manage the diseases more closely to create a varied rotation. May play more like a warlock in plate.

I do agree that we may be seeing a complete change in the presences however. Unholy is situational at best, Blood may become the new frost, and frost the old blood, with unholy providing multipliers on disease damage, like the ability for disease damage to crit, something along that order.

So once we factor in passive bonus, it appears to me that that the Mastery system is the driving force behind the change.

Peace

Blizzard has commented on the tree changes. Frost seems to be sticking to DW, and the 2H tree will stick to Unholy. Unless they completely change their minds (which isn't out of the question), it's going to stay that way for the expansion.

Re: Death Knights will tank as Blood in Cataclysm

It is unfortunate that they're changing this, but it's also an incredibly straight-forward design change.

Some people are too focused in the here-and-now to realize that this change can only benefit Death Knights. If they're not worried about making all three specs viable for both DPS and tanking, then they have the chance to improve the class a lot more than what they are now, instead of having to consider essentially 6 specs for a single class. It does suck when a spec becomes either undesirable for DPS [former BM Hunter here] or simply unusable for DPS as a whole, but with a change like this, Blizzard had to make some people unhappy.

Just please remember, those who are angry, that Cataclysm could very well put all the beauty of DPSing from Blood and put that into the other trees. Beta's not out yet, so we have no clue how this will affect the class.

I just hope they come through with their promise of making all three specs viable for tanking when either overgearing heroics or just leveling, simply because that change would occur for the Warrior, too, and I would love to tank as Arms at least once.

Re: Death Knights will tank as Blood in Cataclysm

Aye, its a sad day for us Blood DPSers however it had to happen eventually. Just a shame it had to be Blood as Frost somehow sounds more tankish than Blood to me. (Not saying Frost > Blood for tanking atm, just saying Ice sounds more defensive than Blood in general).

Always got Unholy to fall back on I guess for 2H DPS. :'(

P.S: I wonder whats going to happen to talents such as Sudden Doom, Dancing Rune Weapon, Abominations Might and Hysteria? Im hoping theyre going to be put into either Frost and/or Unholy, or even be made trainable.

Re: Death Knights will tank as Blood in Cataclysm

QQ here and QQ there Tbh I personally don't care because I like to play DK no matter the specc and hey all you "I <3 frost dual wield yay me I'm awsome" your going all out on blizzard because they said "Hey guys blood is the new tanking specc we havn't really told you what we are going to add" and your all like "FUCK YOU BLIZZARD YOU PHAIL I TELL YOU DUAL WIELD OR I WILL BLOW THIS THING TO PIECES... now to find some explosives" give it a rest okay so now you know blood is the new tanking specc, wait with the QQ till after they've said "no dual wield " or "yea dual wield" 'cause tbh your opinion doesn't matter shit :/ but then again this is the internet let's QQ before we even know what we are going to get.

Mark my words: When we are a year into Cataclysm, posts about "Oh, WotLK was soo great" will start appearing.

Re: Death Knights will tank as Blood in Cataclysm

Ever since Blizz announced Mastery system I wondered how will they handle passive bonuses with all trees. And now we have the answer. Too bad that change strips DKs of one of their trademarks but I guess it cant be avoided.

So, now DKs will basically be Warriors but with slightly diffrent resource system and with no shields?

Re: Death Knights will tank as Blood in Cataclysm

To be honest, once we're past the first tier of raiding in Cata, I'll have enough tank gear built up to just swap to the tank presence and tank heroics as frost anyways. Since crit immunity will be built into presence, any gear with health armor and avoidance will make you a not terrible tank. Sure you'd take less damage and go faster if you were actually blood, but considering aoe threat from frost, I can't imagine that a frost or unholy dk with t11 tanking gear couldn't roflstomp their daily heroic easily. Sure you'll never tank raids, but it doesn't mean you can't tank at all.

Re: Death Knights will tank as Blood in Cataclysm

Originally Posted by Alienganja

I believe this will be a welcomed change, especially since in all honesty they're gonna nerf a lot of the blood talents that bring in a ton of health.

I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but think about it...Bloodworms is probably gonna become your "last minute" talent with a hefty cooldown. Most of the other talents will be nerfed to bring them in to more unison with warrior/druid/paladin abilities, you'll probably lose a lot of that self healing, considering it's going to be a main tanking tree, thus...overpowered self healing would be seen as ridiculous.

It'll be interesting to see what happens, but to those of you rejoicing thinking that you're going to be soloing heroics and be at the state you were at the beginning at WotLK...you thought wrong. There will be endless QQ over the next few months, as these changes come to light. I'm going to be glad when people quote this post and say, oh hey look he was right. GL DK's...GL.